Krino: Early Sketches & Design

Heyo! This is my first $5 patron, behind-the-scenes post. Now that the comic has gone live, I thought it'd be appropriate to share a bit about the process behind it.

For those not in the know, Shards of Krino is actually a reboot of an earlier CYOA I tried to do in 2015. It didn't go super well, but did lay a LOT of groundwork for this new series.

The three main characters, Zijol, Yaldabaoth, and Lucy (LtR) all had their preliminary forms and ideas introduced here. When it came to this reboot, my first necessity was redesigning the characters. Not only had my art style itself significantly evolved, but Lucy specifically needed a major overhaul, as she looked very uninteresting originally.

I made this image back in, about, say, July 2017? In comparing the characters in the two images, there's a distinct upgrade. Lucy's armor is a bit more form fitting, with a much more pleasant color scheme, though this iteration was a bit overly designed and I ended up taking out some of the heavier details by the time the comic launched. Zijol the lizard and Yaldabaoth the demon went through far less upgrades, but they're a lot better drawn now than they used to be.

The sketches up on the top of this post were rather important, though. See, part of making a comic is knowing how to omit details in order to make drawing things more manageable. At least, if it's not a high paying job or you're really willing to stick to it for the long haul. For me, though, I knew I wouldn't be spending too much time on each panel as compared to a regular art piece, so I needed to make sure I knew how to draw the characters in a simplified way. Thus, the sketches helped solidify which details I was keeping and which I'd be leaving out for the actual page drawing.

I also designed two new characters for the early pages: the guard captain (a remnant of the original comic, but entirely reimagined without reference to the original) and Lucy's grandmother, a character who never even was hinted at originally. Their designs are rather simplistic, but the main reason why they exist is to help further the worldbuilding. One of the biggest flaws of the original comic is how little information we get about anything going on. The new Krino aims to fix that by establishing more of the world and situations going on in it. Lucy already feels like a much more reasonable character simply because of a few instances of personality in her dialogue, and the fact that she actually has a life and a family beyond just standing around being a guard for five minutes before the comic begins.